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User blog:Stefano iulli/all nightmare fuel in poppular culture
Back in the future #Perhaps a little bit sillier, but there is no more uncomfortable situation than having to try and curtail your teenage mother's persistent sexual advances. #The scene where Marty almost fades from existence. Seriously, just imagine what it would feel like to see your own hand fade away and realize that this is the end. And since you're being erased from existence, not killed, that means if there is an afterlife, you're not going to it, because your consciousness and all your memories will be non-existent. Thetense music in that scene really does help to sell the horror of it all.Bad enough that you fade completely away from time and memory, the fact that you go through the worst pain you've ever felt in your life adds to it.It can't be easy trying to accomplish a seemingly impossible task in a few days knowing that if you fail, you will be utterly erased from existence. It's a wonder Marty managed to keep a pretty level head with the knowledge he was, er, desperately racing against time. #Biff attempting to rape Lorraine in the car. This scene is especially unsettling for women who have been raped themselves or greatly fear it happening; that you are completely helpless and all you can do is scream and cry for help. What sells it is Lorraine having a tear-soaked face as she looks up with fear to George and quietly says "George, help me, please." Which makes the outcome really, and I mean really satisfying and heartwarming. #Marty watching Doc Brown get shot. Twice. He's seventeen and he watches his best friend get shot. Then he tries to prevent it, and arrives just in time to watch him get shot AGAIN, and feel like there's nothing, ever, he can do about it. *REAL LIFE TBA *PORTAL #Portal isn't that much of a creepy game. It almost completely takes place in a series of brightly lit rooms, which are all white and very clean. There are even opaque windows to observation rooms, but you soon realize that the entire facility seems to be completely deserted, except for you and a slightly malfunctioning AI. Of course, things get worse. Later on, you can climb into the machinery behind the movable walls.To wit, despite spawning a very popular meme, the areas behind the platforms when you go off the rails and see the scribblings of former employee Doug Rattmann become unnerving, this guy has clearly slipped into insanity, and he even knows that at the end, you'll just be met with an agonizing death by burning, and to top it all off, you can see exits just out of reach, and nightmarish music plays in the background.The first time you encounter turrets is the first time you can duck out of the testing chamber into the maintenance areas and see scrawled gibberish on the walls, along with scattered food cans, which some creepy ambient music is played. This is the point, as you hear turrets trying to kill you ask plaintively "ARe yOU StiLL tHEre?", that you know that everything has gone catastrophically wrong and you cannot escape from it.Admittedly, the turrets can easily be knocked over, and can be turned against each other, but if you dodge around them, they can ask "Are you still there?" in a high-pitched Creepy Monotone.By the way, the developer commentary states that the turrets were intended to lull you into a false sense of security.Try using a turret as body armor against the other turrets. It SCREAMS.Turret: Guys! Stop shooting! Please! Guys, it's me! Stop shoo—*static*Pfft, that's it? Every single phrase in the game is Creepy Monotone, you don't know where or who you are, and your only help is GLaDOS, the bipolar, cake-obsessed Master Computer who alternately tries to help you and tries to get you killed (and at one point claims that "killing you and giving you good advice aren't mutually exclusive"). Ironically, this is part of the appeal.GLaDOS's aggression core. The snarling.Well, it IS Mike Patton voicing the thing. #Try carrying a turret through a technology emancipation field: there's one just before each lift at the end of a level. They scream #What's REALLY freaky was the last three levels of the game. The dim, occasionally flashy lighting, the occasional turrets, the writing on the walls... All fit very well with the games 'hilariously creepy' style. #You know those emancipation grills you pass through after every portal? According to GLaDOS, they might emancipate your teeth. While you might think this is just her screwing with you, that theory flies out the window when the announcer mentions how the emancipation grills also might emancipate your inner ear. #The so-called "LSD rooms." LSD equals insanity.Knowing this, the folks at Valve gave you far more time with malfunctioning turrets in Portal 2. Apparently the Aperture Science turret manufacturing line is extremely buggy, spitting out alternating good and faulty models. The solution was not to fix the line, it was to set up an automated QA/QC scanner that pitches the defective ones straight into a crusher. The turret AIs are online before testing and selection, resulting in a series of protests and death screams from ones that are being discarded. (Color-Coded for Your Convenience too, as the good turrets are eggshell-white with kiddy voices while the defective ones are coal-black due to lacking their casing, with voices reminiscent of Steve Buscemi.) Solution to stopping the flow of good turrets? Confuse the scanner, so it starts pitching the good models into the crusher and keeping the blind/lame/weaponless defective models. Good work, now you've got one line of turrets screaming in childlike voices as they fall into a giant metal shredder, and another line heading out the door with parting words like "So, we're all supposed to be blind, then? Not just me? OK..." and "So, uh, I got no bullets. Will there be bullets where I'm going?" #The ending theme, "Still Alive", manages to be both cutesy and very disturbing. Someone made a video. Lyrics here."We do what we must - because we can. For the good of all of us. Except the ones who are dead..." Yeah...The cheerful description of "doing science for the people who are still alive" ("making a neat gun" for them) is bad enough, but the bit that really creeps me out is the line near the end where it becomes "science on the people who are still alive"."And believe me I am still alive". #Also from the soundtrack: "Self Esteem Fund" and "Android Hell" are pretty creepy. But "No Cake For You" stands out as both the best and creepiest ambient music in the entire game. #The update for Portal. Nothing but cryptic messages and content added into the game, including incredibly creepy sounding noises in the data files (which are bad enough until you notice "GET ME OUT OF HERE!") which, when converted into images show some very ominous scenes... #A humorous and mildly creepy Black Comedy suddenly becomes mindbendingly creepy when it's revealed to be happening in the same continuity as Half-Life. This game becomes much more uncomfortable to laugh at when you realize that, in the context of its universe, it's dead fucking serious — as amusing as GLaDOS is, imagine meeting her or someone like her in real life. Not quite so funny now, is it? #The glowing red fade-offs behind things such as fans, vents, pipes, and shafts. The sharp contrast of glowy red against dead, dark colors gives a feeling of being in the belly of the beast (which, you kind of are). The glowing red especially makes you feel like, even though you escaped the incinerator, it's still somewhere just around the corner. And maybe others have died there before you. Try looking at the first set of glowing red vents just past the incinerator and thinking about that. #Thank you for assuming the party escort submission position..." The idea of thinking it's all over then being dragged back in.... #"Your entire life has been a mathematical error. A mathematical error I'm about to correct.""You're curious about what happens after you die, right? Guess what? I know."Made downright chilling after playing Portal 2 when you realize her mind was forcefully put into the GLaDOS... OSat the orders of her dying, poisioned, increasingly mentally-unstable boss. Voiced by J.K. Simmons. #GLaDOS is a supercomputer, one of the fastest and smartest minds around, who gained self-awareness milliseconds after coming online. With that realization, this particular dying statement of hers became absolutely terrifying."Are you trying to escape?" *high pitched laughing sound* Things have changed since the last time you left the building. What's going on out there will make you 'wish you were back in here. I have an infinite capacity for knowledge, and even I'm not sure what's going on outside. All I know is I'm the only thing standing between us, and them. Well, I was.Especially creepy when you remember this is the Half-Life universe directly after the resonance cascade. The scary part is, you really are better off in there, where the aliens and inter-dimensional baddies can't get you. #The beginning of the boss fight with GLaDOS. She drops a spherical object from her body, claims ignorance on what it does, and you drop it in the incinerator. What happens afterward really disturbed me: Her voice becomes garbled, then you hear what sounds like quiet laughter. Then she speaks again, only now her voice, which had been previously very computerized and robotic, has become much more human-like and evilly seductive. And then she informs you of a rather interesting fact:GLaDOS: Good news: I figured out what that thing you just incinerated did. It was a morality core they installed after I flooded the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin to make me stop flooding the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin. So get comfortable while I warm up the neurotoxin emitters... #GLaDOS apparently has a backup file of you that should you die she can resurrect you from, in the final battle she deletes it. Who's to say the Rattmann isn't just one of your earlier tries? And all those times you were crushed or fell into acid? Those actually happened, you just don't remember it.This idea is actually played with near the end of the fan-made mappack of Portal: The Flash Version. Just before the final boss fight in that game, there's some kind of lab with multiple clones of Chell suspended in tubes of liquid, and wearing respirators. #The crunch when a metal moving part crushes you. #Messing around with the portals a bit can show you the face of a pretty disturbed/disturbing Chell.◊ #Portal 1 had several lines of dialogue in the regular test-chambers that become scary as hell when you replay the game. The first great example is during her explanation of the Aperture Science Material Emancipation Grid, "which may, in semi-rare cases, emancipate dental fillings, crowns, tooth enamel and teeth." Semi-rare cases. As in it's not unlikely that it'll happen to you! And just how many of those do you pass through through out the game? Enough to be pretty sure your teeth are gone by the end of the game."Cake, and grief-counseling, will be available at the conclusion of the test.""The Enrichment Center is required to inform you that in the end, you will be baked garbled cake." This is what the subtitles say, which would make this line more scary. The voice-file just outright spoils it by saying "In the end you will be baked, and then there will be cake."An early version featured some hidden dialogue in Testchamber 05. Disabling one of the cameras and throwing it through the door to the small room with a glass-ceiling would cause GLaDOS to say: "You're not a good person. You know that, right?." In her psychotic late-game murderous-computer-voice. This has later been fixed, but hearing the voice who helps you say that during your first play-through was really unnerving!"To ensure the safe performance of all authorized activities, do not destroy Testing Apparatus." The apparatus isn't really that important, since it's just a few surveillance cameras that nobody's looking at, but the first time you play the game, it makes you wonder if you really ought to destroy them or leave them in place."When the testing is over, you will be... missed."In one of the last testchambers, GLaDOS' dialogue (or lack there off) when you reach the exit: monotone voice "Weeeeeeeeeeeeeee-". If this doesn't just hint that something's horribly wrong, what does?The lights flickering like they're about to go out when that happens doesn't help at all."voiceWhat are you doing? Stop. I... I... I... changes to a much more monotone, computer-like voiceWeeeeee are pleased that you made it through this final challenge, where we pretended we were going to murder you." #It is somehow possible to make objects disappear entirely and cause the game to go all buggy on you. It's not sure how the bug was caused, aside from while emancipating everything that isn't nailed to black tiles in Testchamber 16. The result, everything started to bounce and go through solid walls. Which chamber was next? Oh, right... The Companion Cube Room. Imagine the horror of receiving a "faithful Companion Cube" that bounces and can pass through walls that you cannot. It pretty much leaves you stranded alone, and since the cube wasn't destroyed, it just passed through the walls, GLaDOS refuses to provide you with another!This glitch has proven to be trigger-able in any room. Just throw stuff through portals enough times and they will start spontaneously vanishing, and start bouncing and moving through walls. If something like that can happen with Cubes, Turrets and Cameras, it wouldn't be unthinkable that it might even happen to a human being! #Strangely enough Companion Cubes can be heard screaming in the incinerator, The achievement for this act is called fratricide which is the act of murdering your brother which is suspicious given the manly scream while GLaDOS denies any sound being heard and insisting on the cubes destruction. *GHOST BUSTERS #The library scene isn't exactly the scariest scene in a movie, but it can really catch you off guard if you haven't seen it before. #The following involving the demon dogs Zuul and Vinz Clortho. First, we get Dana being grabbed by Zuul note , which leads to her possession; then we get Louis chased out of his own party by Clortho, who is cornered by the monster. Then, we see Dana as she's under Zuul's influence. It's sexy to male audiences at first, but then Zuul takes over and she starts hovering above the bed and makes beastly noises. Meanwhile, Clortho, while possessing Louis, searches for Zuul, and when a cabbie makes a remark, Clortho flashes an intense, intimidating glare. #Ray and Winston's talk about the apocalypse.Winston: Do you remember something in the Bible about the last days, when the dead would rise from the grave?Ray: I remember Revelations 7:12 note . "And I looked as he opened the 6th seal, and behold, there was a great earthquake. And the sun became as black as sack cloth, and the moon became as blood."Winston: "And the seas boiled and the skies fell."Ray: Judgment Day.Winston: Judgment Day.Ray: Every religion has its myth about the end of the world.Winston: Myth? Ray, has it ever occurred to you that maybe the reason we've been so busy lately is 'cause the dead have been rising from the grave?"How about some music?" #Egon's descriptions of Ivo Shandor, the architect of Dana's apartment building, who designed it to have secret passages leading to the roof, which served as an alter for his ominous Gozer cult. Egon also mentions that Shandor was a doctor who performed a lot of "unnecessary surgery."The way Egon smirks while describing Shandor's "unnecessary surgeries." Egon isn't especially good at reassuring smiles in the first place, but in this situation it just looks like he's enjoying Shandor's shenanigans entirely too much. #The darkroom scene in Ghostbusters 2: A claustrophobic room lit with red light (naturally), the doors silently sealed shut without their knowledge, peering intensely at photographs of a possessed painting, which suddenly all catch on fire at once. Not for the pyrophobic and/or claustrophobic.Made worse once you realize that Ghostbusters 2 is much more of a kid's film than the first movie (no one smokes except for Ray and even then he's only seen chewing on the end of an unlit pipe or cigar or holding one (he never has a cigarette), less swearing, far less sexual themes) and they still felt the need to include a scene where two of our main characters nearly die by being burned alive. The utter terror in Ray and Egon's voices as they start to panic and scream for Winston while banging on the door before resolving to run into the bathroom (though Ray questions what good that'll do)... What Do You Mean, It's for Kids? #The "everything goes to hell" scene from the second film, featuring an array of ghouls a lot more intimidating than anything else seen in the series - including a spider-like thing with four arms and fangs that chases a bunch of people out of a store, a fur coat coming back to live as a rabid four headed snarling beast that scurries down the sidewalk, and culminating in an enormous monster reaching over the Washington Square Arch and looming over a crowd of screaming people. #The living fur coat and the return of the Titanic in the second movie. #The extremely spooky By the Lights of Their Eyes scene of Janosz alone in the darkened apartment corridor. His eyes don't just glow, they shine like high beams. #The pink slime in the second movie is both this and Nausea Fuel at the same time. The way it drips and moves can cause some sense of revulsion, and the fact that it's the physical incarnation of human negativity can make it create all kinds of horror, like the above mentioned living fur coat, the return of the Titanic, the rise of many spirits and demons, and (judging from the calls the police were receiving) even make dinosaur skeletons and a park bench come alive and be scary.Not to mention the fact that Ray, Egon and Winston almost drowned in it.And when they got out of it, they were, as Winston puts it, ready to kill each other for absolutely no reason. The slime doesn't just conjure spirits—it makes people Brainwashed and Crazy. What would happen if some of that gunk crept up to the surface? #The decapitated heads on spikes appearing while Winston, Egon, and Ray are searching the abandoned pneumatic transit tunnels. It comes right the fuck out of nowhere and stops almost as quickly as it began.And just before that: "WIIIIIIIINNNSTOOOOOOONNN!!"There is something extremely unsettling about yelling "Hey!" to hear the resulting echo, then silence. #When baby Oscar is shown standing on the ledge of Dana's apartment building, looking down at a couple hundred foot drop, is frightening to anyone, not just mothers. Just goes to show how much Dana loves him, she willingly climbs out onto the ledge to save him.Add to that Janosz flying towards them as a spectral nanny who comes to kidnap Oscar. There's even an up close look at his face where his eyes are glowing red and he has a demonic grin on his face. #Despite being a comedy at its heart, there are still plenty of genuinely scary moments in the movies. The new game has its moments as well. In the movies, bonus points go to the phantom librarian, the zombie cabdriver, the Marshmallow Man's Uncanny Valley ramped up when it's angry, the Scoleri brothers, the heads on spikes in the Sinister Subway, the museum boss dressed as a phantom nanny who spirits Oscar away, Vigo's eyes shifting at the beginning of No. 2... Category:Blog posts